Book 2 (Keeping Faith) Project Comparisons

Jodi Picoult Comparisons

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Jodi Picoult has a very definitive style. So far, I have read three of her books, My Sister’s Keeper, Handle with Care, and Keeping Faith. I most recently read Keeping Faith. The books are really good if you only read one or two of them. As I read more of her books, I start to get bored. Keeping Faith had a really good concept of a story but it is so repetitive reading the same thing over and over again.
Sick Child
In all three books there is a sick child. My Sister’s Keeper, the daughter has cancer. In Handle with Care the daughter has Osteogenesis Imperfecta which makes her extremely sick and leaves her in the hospital frequently.  In Keeping Faith, the daughter is seeing visions of God and gets hurt and sick from the visions.
Mothers
With sick children come protective mothers. Jodi Picoult makes sure to add this character in every book. In My Sister’s Keeper, the mother argues in court that her daughter needs every single medical procedure that will save her life. In Handle with Care, the mother goes to court to sue the doctor who allowed her daughter to be born. In this story, the mother is trying to gain money to help treat her kid. In Keeping Faith, the mother goes to extremes like fleeing the state to protect her child. She also goes to court to gain complete custody over Faith.
Courtroom Drama
Three similarities that come with the overprotective mother is they are in court to do what they think will better their child. The books are very courtroom heavy and it kind of seems that Picoult has had some experience in the law area, or she has just done a lot of research.
Family
Most of her books also include a family atmosphere, at least to begin with. The books I have read all start off with a husband and wife crazy in love with two children. The husband and wife then experience some trials because of their children. In My Sister’s Keeper, the husband starts to take the side of the younger daughter who believes the sister should be taken out of her pain. This causes the mom to get angry but they eventually realize they need to do what’s best. In Handle with Care, the father decides to not support the mother’s decision to go to court. The mother then kicks the husband out of the house and a divorce is filed. The end of the book explains that everything ends up okay and they don’t actually get a divorce. In Keeping Faith, part of the story is the husband has cheated on the wife so they get divorced. This then leads to a custody battle over their daughter.
Tricky Endings
Keeping Faith differs from the other two books in one area; it ends how you expect it to. The mother wins custody over the daughter and she falls in love with a perfect guy. My Sister’s Keeper has a tricky ending where the daughter who doesn’t have cancer dies and ends up donating a body organ to save her sister who has cancer. No one saw this coming. Handle with Care almost ends how you expect it, the family wins the lawsuit and they get an unimaginable amount of money to care for their daughter. The twist is, at the very end the daughter dies from slipping on ice and falling into cold water.
Jodi Picoult
All this being said, I think Jodi Picoult is a great author. It is understandable that she writes essentially the same story over and over again. She’s good at it so why stop? I also think that the books I chose are all similar because that is the style I like. She may very well have different books with different plots, but they might not interest me. So it goes both ways. It is just interesting to compare different aspects of her books to each other and really realize how similar they are.